


Lets Convince Ourselves

by Baptiste



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-21 13:35:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/900895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baptiste/pseuds/Baptiste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’re too young to understand it all, but you ask where your mom is and why you aren’t out looking for her. </p>
<p>When she’s lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lets Convince Ourselves

**Author's Note:**

> dON'T EVEN LOOK AT ME. I didn't choose to have Chuck Hansen feels, Chuck Hansen feels are an obligatory part of Pacific Rim.
> 
> Any and all spelling, grammatical, word creations, merging, are entirely my fault. And I probably didn't do my best. I'm Shakespearing it all up in this work of fiction.

For you, Chuck Hansen. It all started one year after the initial Kaiju attack. When it attacked Sydney for the first time. You’re ten and you’re out with your mom, and both of you waiting to meet your dad for lunch, after he was done with his time taking military duties. She gave you a five dollar bill to buy yourself an ice cream since she long stopped supplying their cupboards with anything that resembled sweets, as to not tempt your father, considering his military diet. They’d eat it in the park, share it. Even though she’d end up eating more than half and she would make you go buy another.

But the next thing you knew, there was a rumbling, almost like a hum and you got confused as you waited in the line for a chocolate ice pop. And there it was. Large and looming and every bit the monster that your father chased away when you were younger. You thought that it was over, that the year meant that they weren’t anymore and that it was over. That there were no more Kaiju, but here one was, so close that it was sudden. Crashing into buildings, crushing everything in it’s way. It passes by, just barely missing you. And then it’s gone as fast as it came, but you could see it in the distance, it crossing the length of the bay in minutes.

But it’s not the thing that confuses you the most, it’s the snow. But it doesn’t snow in Sydney, _everybody_ knows that. Your hands stretch out to cradle it, even among the mess happening around. You still have the childish curiosity to help you push back the panic settling in you. You would realize later that it’s ash.

You’re standing there in the middle of the park, there are people running around, bleeding and dusty. They are screaming. You stay still, you wonder where your mom is. Where-- You’re scared, there are tears in your eyes from the dust and fear; and you’re choking on it. Standing still you convince yourself from enough camping trips with your dad that it was better to stay where you are than to run around wildly. Even though you’re still because you’re panic stilled and so scared to do anything else. So you’re eleven and in the middle of an epidemic and you can’t find your mom and all you want is for your dad to come and make everything better. But instead of eleven you feel seven. Then all of a sudden you hear ‘thank god’s,’ your name, and maybe even your mother’s.  

And your dad is there like a saviour. He’s on his knees and his arms are around you holding you in his arms (for the last time in a while). You’re still asking where your mother is. Where is-- But you don’t have enough time to say anything, enough coherency in your voice and mind to properly get something out that aren’t sobs. Because your dad is picking you up even though you’re too old to be carried. And he’s taking you away. Even though you desperately want to ask where your mother is and why they aren’t looking for her. She was lost, you say. For some reason that’s the only thing you manage to get out. That day she was lost in more ways than one.

_Where is she?_

______________________

 

The next year your father joined the newly sanctioned Jaeger program. And your life after that you are raised in the cockpit. It’s your bed, education and way of life from then on. You keep the memory of your mother that day clutched in your stomach and try to move on, those memories before everything pushing you on.

 

_____________________

 

Mako Mori is one of the few people that has a prominent role in his life. One of the few children that was raised around Jaegers and on the base. One of the few that you respect and awe and maybe have the smallest of crushes on. She’s beautiful in the way she flows and meticulous in her work. Even though she’s polite and to the point, she demands the same sort of respect as the rest of the men and women in  the base. When she’s older though, because at twelve everybody finds it incredibly cute. (Even you, but you don’t admit it). So the day you see the name Raleigh Becket on the dossier under the listing of pilots, you blank out a moment. You don’t know how to feel because at one point he was idol, your role model, someone other than your dad you looked at and thought, I want to be him. He was all these things until you got bitter and resentful for hero who left the world for his devices and disappeared for what’s left of the world. But when he finally comes onto the base and you see him for the first time, there’s none of that childhood hero worship. You see him with Mako and how she looks at Becket, how easy she smiles for him. Those kind of smiles that stopped for you when you became a pilot. Harsh, arrogant and cocky.

Something clenches in your stomach and it makes you feel as if it’s the day you lost your mom all over again.

___________________________

  
  


Stacker Pentecost is the last third of the people you admire. Your father is a constant so he doesn’t count in this list of three (even though he will always be the first). He reminds you of the father that could had been, so you’re bitter when you see him, think about his relationship with Mako. Because he’s better than your dad. And no one could possibly be better than your father, the best and one of the first in the program. But. Seeing how Mako turned out, how happy she can be in his presence, how they share easy conversation with each other, how they treat each other with the respect they deserve. Somehow he has managed to cultivate this relationship with the girl he adopted from the ashes of Japan, and it must means he really cares for her. And about the relationship you have with yours, it makes you question if your father doesn’t love you enough. They are something you wish you still had.

_________________________________

 

Your father. You haven’t called him any adornment for years now, since he stopped being a father and the man you wanted to be better than. You get so angry with him, because sometimes you want him to drop the military learned facade and admit that he is a father. Your father. But he has an image to uphold, so none of that touchy feely stuff. Actual emotions. _Pssh._

Sometimes you wish that he’d be the father you had once, even for a moment in those times you needed him. Before you life went to shit, when you had a room with glow in the dark stars on the ceiling, before when people thought it was crazy for monsters to come from earth rather than space, before your mother died, when you wanted to be a mix of firefighter, circus performer and spaceman. When your father used to hug you and call you hero and just admit that you are his son.

At one point you’d want anything and everything, but these days you just settle. Both of you don’t talk about the feelings and words and adorations never said again. Even though you guys were in each other heads, one would think that it’d be easier for you two to get through your feelings. But it only makes it harder. Because both of you are cowards to admit anything. You don’t know what you are to each other anymore.

__________________________________

 

The year is 2025 and the Jaeger program has been cut and everything they had left was put into the construction of the wall. Not everything. Because you and Striker Eureka are still there. You didn’t think it would had ended up this way but it did. And it feels as if your life is ending, not because you're sacrificing your life on a kamikaze mission. It’s ending because you have to consider an after. For once in your life, you have to consider what to do other than the only thing you know how to do great.

You think that you’d like to go back and have things that you wished you could had done. But you don’t, because you think back to Stacker’s words about no regrets. So you gladly board the Jaeger with a smile.

____________________________________

 

_Between the affirment that they were going to pave a pathway with their sacrifice and each other’s last thoughts. Stacker or maybe even yourself, manages to board an escape pod and save yourself from a nuclear blast and force of the explosion. One would think if you made it through that, that you made it. That you made it through the apocalypse and won. But to nobody’s knowledge, not even yourself. You died._

_You were dead for exactly two minutes and 37 seconds. And either from the impact of the pod hitting the surface or maybe an act of god. Your heart starts again. You begin to breathe. Your second chance is set into play._

 

_You open your eyes._

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

 

 

_You’re alive._

  
  



End file.
